The Best Way To Meal Prep Based On Your Personality

Meal prepping is a great tool to help us busy worker bees stay healthy during the week, even when our schedules get super hectic. Prepping a week’s worth of meals every Saturday or Sunday can help you resist the urge to order high-calorie takeout after work when you’re starving and just can’t even with the idea of cooking dinner.

You might think that meal prepping is reserved for high-strung individuals who always have their shit together, but everyone can tackle this culinary endeavor. The key is to find a meal prepping method that works best for you and your lifestyle. Here’s the ideal way to meal prep based on your personality.

For The Indecisive One

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You can’t make up your mind on what to eat for dinner most nights and you’ve found yourself stopping halfway through ordering Chinese takeout to make pasta instead. If you’re indecisive, you might fear that meal prepping is too much of a commitment and that it wouldn’t allow you to change your mind at the last minute if you’re not into that night’s pre-planned dinner. But meal prepping can actually make the life of an indecisive person a lot easier. If you pre-plan your meals, you won’t waste hours debating what to cook each night.

Give yourself some wiggle room to play around with dinner options by prepping three to four proteins each week, along with multiple vegetable varieties. For instance, you could spend an hour or two on Sunday searing some chicken, cooking up some ground beef and turkey and hard boiling some eggs. That way, you’ll have at least three different dinner options to choose from each night.

For The Adventurous One

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Who says meal prepping has to be boring? Just because you’re prepping food ahead of time doesn’t mean that you need to eat the same thing every night or sacrifice on flavor. The key to keeping things interesting with meal prep is to mix and match food items. Prep multiple veggies, proteins and starches ahead of time and choose a different combination of each category for every dinner — one night could be chicken and sweet potato mash and another night could be chicken tacos and veggies. You also don’t need to use an endless list of ingredients to make a creative meal. For example, if you’re prepping chicken or turkey for the week, consider cooking each cut of meat with different seasonings to keep things interesting.

For The Early Riser

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If you’re an early bird, you’ll want to keep the amount of prep that you have to do before dinner each night to a minimum — slicing and dicing after a long day at work proves to be even more difficult if you’ve been up since 5 a.m. Since mornings are your friend, consider prepping the bulk of your food on the weekend and then portion out your meals and add last-minute touches before you head to work each morning. That way, your meal-prepping efforts won’t fall through if you have a last-minute, early-morning meeting or your alarm fails to go off one day. Cooking and seasoning batches of meat ahead of time and having pre-washed, sliced veggies on hand will make your day-to-day meals a lot faster and easier to make.

For The Night Owl

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If you stay up late most nights, you might have time to cook elaborate dinners, but chances are that you hit snooze one too many times in the morning to do the same for breakfast. The solution? Instead of grabbing a generic bagel or skipping breakfast altogether, consider prepping your morning meals the night before. Overnight oats are an easy grab-and-go option for those who are always rushing in the morning. Just toss your favorite oats in a jar with milk or water and some yummy add-ons like berries, nut butter and banana slices, and leave the jar overnight in your fridge. You’ll have a deliciously healthy breakfast concoction to wake up to in the morning. Who knows, it may even inspire you to get out of bed faster.

For The Lazy One

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If the hassle of chopping and stirring various food items combined with the need to clean up multiple pots and pans post-meal keeps you from cooking, then sheet pan dinners could be your new best friend. This cooking method will easily allow you to prep dinners for the next three to four days in under an hour with minimal mess. Just toss your protein of choice (chicken and salmon tend to work best for this cooking method) in an olive oil-coated sheet pan alongside some of your favorite veggies and stick everything into the oven. You’ll have delicious and nutritious dinners ready for multiple nights in no time — and only one pan to clean!

For The One Who’s Always On The Go

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Your life’s so hectic that you’re always on the move. You probably resort to eating bagels or granola bars for breakfast and store-bought salads for lunch. You stray away from meal prep because you rarely have time to sit down for an actual meal. If this is the case, then dedicating a couple of hours on a Sunday to preparing grab-and-go options in bulk for the week could make healthy eating easier for you and even save you money in the long run since you’ll be eating out less.

Consider buying veggies and fruits in bulk and storing them in your freezer so that you can easily whip up healthy and portable smoothies for breakfast. Smoothies are a great option for those who don’t have time for a sit-down breakfast. Also, consider prepping a healthy wrap instead of your typical salad for lunch — it’s easier and faster to eat but can still be equally as nutritious.